Outreachy week 3: Down the Questions Path

The last week we continued with WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Organizer Handbook-based questions: the second half of the question pool was composed, reviewed and corrected by @andreamiddleton and moved to the testing site we’re working on for now.

This actually raised a couple of questions on the quiz settings:

  1. What should be the passmark percentage for the quizzes included in the course?
  2. Should a learner be able to see which questions she answered incorrectly?
  3. Should a learner be given any further specific feedback based on the option she chose?

For question #1 it was decided the passing rate for all of the quizzes would be 100% because it’s really important that deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook./WordCamp & meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. organizers have mastery over program materials. That might force the learner to read the lesson not once, but twice – but that way we will be sure the most important points were all covered and hopefully understood.

If some of the questions from the set are answered incorrectly, we will ask a learner to retake the quiz. Given that, I thought we should really make sure that it is clear for the learner in this case which of the questions are answered incorrectly (then she can read the lesson again paying attention to the details related to this question).  I recently had to pass a quiz myself where only the percentage of correct answers were shown, which made it hard to understand what was correct or not. It even involved some combinatorics. 🙂 The pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party we use, Sensei, unfortunately, does not allow retaking quizzes and displaying the questions answered incorrectly at the same time, so @hlashbrooke helped to add some custom functionality here. At the moment, the answer notes is pretty rough and displays overlapping text, but that’s something that we are going to remedy once we have all the content in place.

Regarding question #3, we toyed with the idea of having specific feedback to the questions options: i.e. when a learner selects a correct option there is something like “This is correct. <A rephrasing of the correct answer>”, and if not “No, this is not correct. <Explanation why not>”. The advantage of having feedback is that learner would get to understand better why they are wrong immediately, and not feel confused. There are also disadvantages: they won’t be likely to go and reread the text to try to understand why they are wrong, which may limit the understanding. And it actually turned out that with Sensei it’s only possible at the moment to have one feedback item shown no matter what the chosen option is. That lead us to leave feedback-related plans for now.

All in all, I think it’s a really nice compromise between keeping the main idea of what was originally planned and adjusting it to the way the e-learning plugin we use actually can do things.

Next week I’ll be working with @chanthaboune based on the new content added to the Meetup organizer handbook. The flow will be similar to the way the other two were/are being handled:

  • Create an outline based on the way materials will be organized
  • Move the handbook content to Sensei
  • Start creating questions

#community-management, #meetups-2, #outreachy, #training-workshops, #wordcamps